Hi Jim, I have just joined and am researching hydraulic power in railway goods yards. Your knowledge of these installations could help me a lot.

At the Historical Model Railway Society's Museum and Study Centre at the Midland Railway Centre in Derbyshire we have a large working model in 7mm scale of a Midland Railway Goods Station as it would have been in 1906/7. It is a smallish urban goods station, but supposedly with all the facilities. We have all the correct rolling stock, locomotives, horse drawn carts, and feature shunting horses and capstan shunting. The buildings are exact models of Midland Railway prototypes.

I have noticed that we have made no provision for generating the hydraulic power that would have been used for the capstans, the lifts in the two-storey goods warehouse, or the cranes in both the goods shed and the goods warehouse. The location of the model is fictional: it is called "Dewsbury Goods" where the Midland did not succeed in establishing a main line railway station with a Goods Station, so we have to find a suitable prototype of a MR hydraulic power house to copy. However it does not need to be a large structure like those that still exist here and there. So would you have any idea what a small Midland Railway Hydraulic House would have looked like?

I knew Manchester had a "public" hydraulic power system which operated until the early 1970s. One of the pumps has been restored and is now in the Mcr museum of science and industry, along with other exhibits on hydraulics. One of the first cities to have a practical public system was Hull! (The Leeds system has been waiting for government funding approval since 1890. It's called the Northern Powerhouse !!!)

It used to be said that the statue of the Black Prince had been placed in City Square , near the station, pointing South to tell all the southerners who've just got off the train to b****r off back down south!